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A Treatise Upon the Art of Flying, by Mechanical Means
A Treatise Upon the Art of Flying by Mechanical Means Author:Thomas Walker Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: It is now almost twenty years since I was first led to think, by the study of birds and their means of flying, that if an artificial machine were formed with win... more »gs, in exact imitation of the mechanism of one of those beautiful living machines, and applied in the very same way upon the air, there could be no doubt of its being made to fly; for it is an axiom in philosophy, that the same cause will ever produce the same effect. .. ... It is easy to demonstrate, that a bird is no more able to fly than a man without the mechanical effect of wings; therefore, when a man is furnished with a pair of wings large enough, and can apply them in the same manner as a bird does, and with sufficient power, The ostrich, in the torrid regions of Africa; the emu, in the extensive plains of Paraguay, in South America, which standing erect, is about seven feet high, its legs are three feet long, its thighs are nearly as thick as the thighs of a man; it runs so swift that the fleetest dogs are foiled by it; the cassowary and the dodo,in the Molucca Islands ; and the pen. guins, in the Straits of Magellan and the South Sea Islands: all these birds are as utterly incapable of flying as a man. none of tkem being provided with wings for that purpose. chapter{Section 4there can be no reason to doubt of a man being able to fly as well as a bird. The machine which I have planned is as close a copy of the natural mechanism of a bird as artificial means will admit of; and when my readers are made thoroughly acquainted with both the natural and artificial means of flying, I flatter myself they will then be willing to acknowledge that my scheme is a very rational one, highly calculated to insure success in the accomplishment of the art of flying, one of the most extraordinary and desirable arts with wh...« less